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Biological Chemistry

Structure Revealed For Bacterial Infection Apparatus

The first glimpse at the machinery used by several pathogens to infect cells is expected to affect biochemical research on several fronts

by Sarah Everts
March 10, 2014 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 92, Issue 10

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Credit: Harry Low, et al.
The newly characterized type IV machinery (right) used by some bacteria to infect host cells is structurally different from the type III system (left) found in other pathogens.
This image shows two systems used by bacteria to infect host cells.
Credit: Harry Low, et al.
The newly characterized type IV machinery (right) used by some bacteria to infect host cells is structurally different from the type III system (left) found in other pathogens.

When the pathogens that cause whooping cough and digestive disorders such as ulcers and stomach cancer infect humans, they do so with a multiprotein molecular machine, called the type IV secretion system, that introduces virulent factors into cells. A first structural glimpse of this 34-nm-long assembly has been reported by a team of researchers led by Rémi Fronzes of the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, and Elena V. Orlova and Gabriel Waksman of University College London (Nature 2014, DOI: 10.1038/nature13081). The team used electron microscopy to get an averaged 21-Å-resolution structure of the type IV secretion system. The infection apparatus has “markedly different architecture, and consequently mechanism, to other known bacterial secretion systems,” the authors note. The structure provides antibiotic developers with a needed peek at how nasty pathogens infect cells. And because the type IV secretion system is used by many kinds of benign bacteria to exchange genes, the structural information could be useful for the fundamental understanding of microbiology. Type IV secretion systems have also been touted as possible tools for genetically modifying human cells.

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